Nesrin had been crushing garlic all morning, but the forceful blow of the mortar grew louder when he started talking about Syria. From 2010 to 2014 he participated in the revolution there. “They all conspired to end the civil rights movement,” she said.
Nesrin (who asked that her last name not be used to protect her family still in Syria) now makes a living as a cook and evangelist of Mediterranean cuisine. In an industrial kitchen in West Los Angeles, three plates of vegetables bathed in olive oil were stewing on the stove; She poured the garlic paste into the green beans. Her cooking style is intense but never harassed. Wearing gold sandals and a splattered green apron, her hair tied back with a cloth headband, she fiddled with each clay pot one by one, sprinkling the okra with cilantro, scooping kosher salt from the box onto an eggplant tagine, and tapping the three . with a pinch of Aleppo pepper.
“People sell things we don't eat or know about in the Middle East,” says Nesrin, owner of Mediterranean Pastries Den. “There's really no representation of the Syrian table or the diversity of what we eat.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Since 2019, Nesrin has operated a stand called Mediterranean Pastries Den at three west side farmers markets: Mar Vista, Playa Vista and Hermosa Beach. I have been a regular customer of the Mar Vista Farmers Market for eight years. While there are many vendors who remember my face, Nesrin is the only one who knows my name and asks about my family. If my baby is with me, she will make him laugh and laugh while she speaks Arabic in a high, silly register. She is not a salesperson, she is a hostess.
In Southern California, Syrian food is concentrated in Anaheim and the San Fernando Valley. Nesrin saw an opportunity on the west side of Los Angeles, where there is a lot of enthusiasm for eating vegetables, but often without a strong cultural context. “People sell things that we don't eat or know in the Middle East. Hummus with Avocado: We never eat hummus with avocado, at all. There is really no representation of the Syrian table or the diversity of what we eat,” she stated.
The name of their booth is a bit misleading. Her pastries are delicious – the luxurious baklava with pistachios and rosewater, and the date filling in her maamoul biscuits heavily spiced with fennel and mahlab – but she is especially adept at vegetables, beans and whole grains.
But don't miss the baklava with pistachios and rose water, or their maamoul cookies stuffed with dates, seasoned with fennel and mahlab.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
For their eggplant tagine, the eggplant is first fried and then cooked with onion, garlic and tomatoes; It's rich, sweet and creamy, and studded with whole cloves of garlic. She cooks pieces of okra gently, folding them rather than stirring them to keep what she calls “the goo” at bay. A Yemeni-style ful dish she calls Yemeni beans is made from mashed favas stewed with garlic, tomatoes, cumin and turmeric.
The ful recipe comes from a family of diplomats from that country, who were Nesrin's neighbors while he was growing up in Damascus. His father was a real estate developer and the family traveled frequently to Europe and the Middle East. Combined with life in the diplomatic quarter, this cosmopolitan childhood gave Nesrin a taste, literally, for a wide variety of cuisines.
In the late 2000s, he came to the United States for graduate studies. Nesrin had to learn how to pump gas, because before her family had always had a driver. When the Arab Spring began, she felt it was his duty to return home to help restore democracy. “It was time to help your country when you are educated and equipped with democratic values,” she says.
He returned to the United States, where he has family, as an asylum seeker, and now has a green card. Her dream is to open a restaurant. But the rents in West Los Angeles, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars needed for construction, have put that dream out of reach for her, at least for now.
While cooking during the week, Nesrin listens to the news and checks alerts on an iPad placed on a soft, padded stand near the stove. When I visited her on October 5, she was flipping through stories about Kevin McCarthy's ouster as House Speaker and was despairing about the chaos in American democracy.
The Egyptian beans at Mediterranean Pastries Den at the Mar Vista Farmers Market are one of owner Nesrin's specialties. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Nesrin's dream is to open his own restaurant. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
We spoke again in November and I asked her how the news about the war between Israel and Hamas had affected her. Having seen so much suffering during the Syrian civil war, she said that in the conflict between Hamas and Israel's right-wing government, “it's hard to see civilians paying the price.”
Another dish he sells is a version of musakhan, sumac chicken baked with onion and spices, which Palestinian chef Reem Asil called “Perhaps the most iconic of all Palestinian chicken dishes.”
It's another recipe that Nesrin learned from a neighbor, this Palestinian, while growing up. Follow the news in Gaza closely. She said: “I know real people there, who have real families. I follow their stories. “For me, I’ve been in this situation.”
the war has brought renewed scrutiny to the old cliché that food brings people together and the intense, almost cruel pressure exerted on, say, a bowl hummus humanize the people who made it.
Nesrin's clients largely do not share her cultural background, but she does not try to prove anything about herself. Her mission is to address the flaws in American food culture, whether it's an overreliance on meat or the perhaps misguided practice of serving roasted vegetables. Many of her regular customers are families because kids love her okra and green beans, gently cooked and full of flavor. I'm guilty of roasting my okra, a vegetable I didn't eat as a child, and eating your food has taught me a whole new appreciation for it. What is the point? She says, “I want to show the public how to eat.”
